The Play

The days, weeks, and months immediately after October 25, 1986—much of the next decade, really—were not good to Bill Buckner. A reminder of his sin: Game Six of the World Series, Mets versus Red Sox. Mookie Wilson, the Mets’ left fielder, burps a soft ground ball down the line. Buckner, Boston’s first baseman, bends to pick it up but doesn’t. He watches it roll between his legs. The Mets win the Series, and Buckner eventually moves to Idaho. “Let me tell you a little story,” Buckner said the other day, his mustache gray but still full. “When I went back to Boston, about two weeks after the Series, I pulled up to a stoplight and, all of a sudden, this guy behind me starts honking. I kind of ignored him, but he kept honking. So I get out of the car and I walk back and say, ‘You got a problem?’ . . . He recognized who I was and made a pretty smart-ass remark, and I kind of lost it. He went to take off, and I reached in and grabbed him around the neck. So he’s driving down the road and I’m bouncing all over. Luckily, I let go.”

There may be no second acts in American life, but you’re still allowed to milk your first for all it’s worth. Thus, Buckner was telling this story onstage at the Gramercy Theatre, surrounded by Mets memorabilia and with Wilson seated to his left. A crowd had paid up to a hundred and twenty-eight dollars a head to hear the pair rehash the greatest and lowest moment of their respective careers—as if Custer and Sitting Bull had agreed to deconstruct Little Bighorn. Linda Rossel, a Mets fan, said that she felt bad for Buckner but was glad to see him embrace the pain. “It reminds me of ‘Chicago,’ ” she said. “At the end, the two girls leave everything behind them and just put on a show.”

Buckner and Wilson, sixty-three and fifty-seven, have been putting on a show for several years now, ever since Steiner Sports, a memorabilia shop in New Rochelle, approached them about teaming up to sign autographs. At the time, Wilson was driving eighteen-wheelers and Buckner was living in Boise. “It definitely wasn’t our idea,” Wilson said backstage. “I didn’t have that kind of vision.”

“And I didn’t want to do it,” Buckner said. “But I’d been through some tough shit, and I thought, You know what, if they’re gonna pay me that money, I’ll take the money. I’ll put my kids through college.”

Onstage, Buckner and Wilson answered questions about their careers, about how baseball had changed—the money was better, the players less hardy—and, finally, about “The Play,” their name for Buckner’s error and the title of a painting by the sports-memorabilia artist Rob MacDougall (MacDougall calls himself “Canada’s premier sports artist”), reproductions of which they sign and sell. In the painting, Wilson is shown grinning while Buckner sulks off the field. “I have no room to feel sorry for myself,” Buckner told the audience, which responded with a sustained ovation, as if the theatre were Oprah’s studio.

This appearance was merely another step in the fallen American celebrity’s path to redemption: Buckner had completed another important one two years earlier, by playing himself in a sitcom. He appeared on an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” catching a baby that had been dropped from a burning building. The catch required a stunt double, and multiple takes, which Buckner would have appreciated in 1986.

The Q. & A. was followed by a meet and greet in the theatre’s basement, which had been mood-lit by means of red Japanese umbrellas placed over the ceiling lights. A television was replaying the broadcast of the 1986 game, which Buckner watched intently—he claimed never to have seen it in full before—while Wilson greeted the paying customers. Buckner had been invited back to Fenway after Boston won the 2007 World Series, and the Red Sox fans at the Gramercy seemed to look at him more with pity than with anger. Several people asked after his son, who is now in the Chicago Cubs’ minor-league system. “He understands that baseball can be a cruel game,” Buckner said. “If you wanna play, you have to be able to deal with failure. If you can’t—”

“It’s the wrong game for you,” Wilson said.

“You have no chance,” Buckner went on. “I used to go to bed and I’d think about a pitch that I swung at and missed five games before. Two-thirds of the games you have probably aren’t gonna be very good, so you have to be able to go home, eat your dinner, play with your kids, be nice to your wife, and then come back to the ballpark the next day, ready to go. If you can’t do that, you better try something else.” ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the March 11, 2013, issue.